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How To Build Customer Loyalty In an Internet World

There’s a a series of phases of running an internet business. The first phase is to drive web traffic, increase awareness and build your subscriber list. The second phase is to motivate those prospects to become customers. But what’s the next phase? Once you have customers, how do you continue to increase sales and motivate purchases?

Building customer loyalty involves a few different strategies. The first is to continue to offer quality information. You want to give them a reason to come back to your website as well as think of you and your products or services often. You can accomplish this by continuing to reach them through your autoresponder, social networking, blog posts and other marketing strategies.

How To Build Customer Loyalty with 5 Selling Strategies

1. Continue building your community. The more people feel like they belong and they can relate to your brand and personality, the more they are likely to become repeat customers. And they’re more likely to recommend you to others. Social networking, blogging and social networking badges and buttons on your website are excellent ways to accomplish this.

2. Reward your customers for their loyalty. Loyalty programs help accomplish a few things. They make customers feel appreciated. They motivate purchases because loyalty programs and rewards often come with privileged promotions, special pricing and exclusive information. And they help build your community.

3. Build a marketing funnel. It makes sense to provide choices by having a tiered level of products or services in your catalog. If your first entry point cost $17 you don’t want your next product to cost $500. There has to be a mid range too. And like wise, make sure you have larger priced items available too.

4. Tap into those all important buying triggers. Your customers will respond to emotion, scarcity, urgency, authority, credibility and liking. Embrace these buying triggers and use them in your communications and promotions.

5. Finally, make sure it’s easy to buy. Sometimes we don’t realize that there are artificial blocks to making a purchase. Maybe we ask for too much information during the checkout process, maybe the call to action isn’t clear. Eliminate any obstacles to making a purchase and make it extremely easy to buy from you.

Turning customers into loyal customers through customer centric selling is an ongoing process. However, once you create good systems and procedures here, increasing sales and motivating purchases can essentially be an automatic and repeatable process.